Sværvægter (Heavyweight)

In the eyes of a child, a father is viewed as a hero. Can this father live up to his son’s expectations and does he have higher aspirations of his own?

Father and son lie on their stomachs, eating cereal, with the lower portions of their body inside the blanket-made tent, in front of the television. The son showing interest in what his dad does for a living, suggests that maybe he can come to work with him that day, to which, his father replies that his boss probably wouldn’t approve. Without much ado, the son then suggests that his toy action figure, Jack, come along with his father.

Outdoors, an action figure is being manipulated to play out an action-packed-cat-saving-hero role by the father. Once a beeping is heard, the action figure gets tucked away and the father rips out a citation from his portable parking ticket printer. Not a moment after placing the ticket under the windshield wiper, a car with a loud exhaust and thumping house music comes into the parking lot. The driver with the loud music didn’t center his car in a parking spot, so the father approaches the car to warn them about the potential violation and then discovers that they were driving while on drugs. Having gone from a mild insult from inside the car to an in-your-face standoff, the driver eventually steps back into the car and peels away from the parking lot after calling the father a “plastic cop.”

Obviously bothered by the encounter throughout the day, as evidenced in his low citation count and a barely restrained spastic episode at the office, the father finally returns to the refuge of his relationship with his son. Before dinner is served, the father sees his son drawing a picture of him in his uniform and bloodied bodies strewn around him, as to portray his father as a hero, a doer of good, with the evildoers suffering at his feet. Silently, the father observes and doesn’t react. His son believes he’s more than a parking attendant – he wishes he could live up to his son’s expectations and be something more than what he truly is.